Looking in on a healthy crowd and tables of food, a student walked into Josiah's Wednesday afternoon, stopped and immediately turned on her heel and walked out. The 100-plus senior citizens she saw assembled inside weren't the usual Jo's crowd, but they were students.
The event was the opening convocation of the University's Life Long Learning program, which houses and administers classes, or "study groups," designed for retirees seeking seminar-style education.
Formerly known as the Brown Community for Learning in Retirement, the program offers weekly classes to older adults - many of them Brown alums - in a collaborative setting without lectures and assignments. Ten student coordinators design curricula for the courses and steer discussions for the nearly 180 members. Brown faculty are uninvolved with the program.
This semester, each of the 12 courses will be taught for 10 weeks, from early October to mid-December. Classes range from "Viva Vivaldi!" to "The Need for a Second Constitutional Convention" and from "Vikings to Scandinavians: Terrorists Transformed" to "What in the World is Going On."
At the convocation, Provost David Kertzer '69 P'95 P'98 spoke to BCLIR members about Brown's presence and expansion in Providence since 1770 and lauded them for their intellectual curiosity.
"Brown and its campus should be designed to serve students and the larger public," Kertzer said. "I think of you as Brown students. You are the model for all our Brown students."
Despite Kertzer's warm convocation sentiments, BCLIR and the University are not as closely affiliated as the speech would suggest.
Brown runs Life Long Learning, which provides BCLIR with administrative support and classroom space for the 10 classes held on campus. The other two classes are held at off-campus locations at Johnson and Wales University and at the Rochambeau Public Library on Hope Street and are not funded by the University.
Last spring, BCLIR members formally voted on whether to become completely independent of Brown. Fifty-four percent voted in favor of splitting off, short of the two-thirds majority needed under the group's bylaws.
This year, for the first time, BCLIR will charge a $25 membership fee in addition to the $140 price of each class, according to Barbara Findley, the group's president.
Findley said the membership fee would cover BCLIR's new expenses that Brown would have covered in the past.
Karen Sibley, dean of Summer and Continuing Studies, who helps oversee LLL, told The Herald that "Brown remains deeply embedded" in the program but not in matters of "social networking and interaction," which will be BCLIR's responsibility, adding that BCLIR was "better" at such extracurricular programming than Brown. Sibley said the split between the two was mutual.
Lynne Harper, chair of the BCLIR curriculum committee, said Brown has "progressively distanced themselves from us except for providing classroom space."
Still, Findley said Brown plays a crucial role in keeping the program afloat.
"Without their help at this point we don't have any place to go," Findley said. "Brown has so much control over what we do."
Findley said one of the reasons for Brown's alleged phasing-out of the BCLIR program was that some Brown administrators and faculty weren't aware or didn't have respect for the program, which bore Brown's name and was housed on its campus.
"It was suggested (by Brown) that we keep a low profile," Findley said. "We ran a science colloquium a few years ago. Somebody from physics or chemistry would ask 'who are you?'"
Sibley acknowledged that senior academic leaders at Brown complained, "How can Brown be associated with something that has no Brown professors included?"
"If you are going to offer something academically, and it's going to be at Brown, you want to make sure it's good," Sibley added.
Carol Crowley, who began taking classes in 2000 and has been a coordinator several times, said LLL has enhanced her life tremendously by providing a "second liberal education."
"I always wanted to study philosophy or American studies as an undergrad but I never had time," said Crowley, who went to Mount Holyoke College.
The program has allowed Crowley to "meet the kinds of people who might not be at the golf club, the country club."
"Plenty of people in their eighties are still developing intellectually," she said.
Harper, who said BCLIR was one of the most expensive LLL programs of its kind - most others cost around $50 - was not deterred by the costs.
"We want to be here, we like the program ... the Brown library, the campus," Harper said. "After a few years you make friends and go out to restaurants, concerts."
"What keeps them going is this organization," she added. "One woman once gave a presentation Thursday and died Monday."
Bill Kulik, who has been enrolled in LLL since 1999, was drawn to the program not for its Brown reputation, but, like Crowley, to interact with people eager to continue learning for its own sake.
"It's much better to be older and learning for fun than to go to school and get a degree," Kulik said.
